STABILIZING AFGHANISTAN

October 20, 2022 Analytical articles

Foreign Policy in Focus

October 18, 2022

Here’s how to promote projects inside Afghanistan that benefit and empower the people.

The Taliban waged an impressive military campaign and removed the prior government in August 2021. They know how to fight, but they clearly do not know how to run a government. The new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has not been able to get international recognition. Western nations have suspended most humanitarian aid while the World Bank and International Monetary Fund also halted payments. In February 2022, the United States seized the frozen reserves of the Afghan central bank, severely crippling the overall banking system. Just last month, the United States used part of these frozen funds to set up the Afghan Fund at the Bank for International Settlements in an effort to kickstart the economy without financially supporting the Taliban government, which has been systematically diverting international support to its own favored recipients.

The situation in Afghanistan is dire. Saad Mohseni, who has managed media operations in Afghanistan for 20 years, notes that it is difficult to overstate the multiple crises facing the country, including food shortages and sky-high food prices. According to the World Food Program, more than a third of the population is “marching to starvation,” and an astonishing 97 percent of the population risks falling below the poverty line by the end of 2022. Meanwhile, through its profound disenfranchisement of women—girls older than 12 have been banned from school—the Afghan government has become the most gender repressive in the world. Western intelligence experts are also concerned that the country is once again becoming a haven for terrorist groups. In the opinion of UN expert Richard Bennett, reprisals targeting opponents and a clampdown on freedom of expression amount to a further descent towards authoritarianism.

The Taliban have been totally unresponsive to pressures to change their fundamentalist policies despite the steadily worsening internal situation. One result is a growing resistance movement that encompasses the National Resistance Front (NRF) and the Afghanistan Freedom Front. So, the one positive aspect of the Taliban takeover—the secession of fighting—is in danger of disappearing, compounding the already dire situation.

In terms of alternatives, Anna Larson at the U.S. Institute of Peace sees stable democracy as an elusive prospect. Anatol Lieven at the Quincy Institute sees some potential for Taliban pragmatism and recommends that the Biden administration provide basic food and humanitarian assistance while keeping a watchful distance. Both Adam Weinstein and Saad Mohseni recommend sustained interaction with the Taliban to encourage moderating tendencies and help empower the realists.

The Taliban are notoriously fragmented. They had barely consolidated control in late 2021 when reports emerged of friction within the leadership. A more recent assessment notes that many policies still vary greatly from one province to the next as Taliban officials react to local community expectations. Many issues are still resolved via personal connections with influential Taliban figures, regardless of their official position in government. Opportunities abound to influence Taliban policies, not with pressures from outside but from within.

No international actor is interested in promoting new warfare in Afghanistan. The United States withdrew its troops. Russia is distracted by its intervention in Ukraine. China is involved in trade with Kabul but is not in any way promoting insurgency. Pakistan is presently overwhelmed with natural disasters. Turkey has been supportive of efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and promote development. There is some friction with Central Asia, especially low-level fighting on the Tajik border area, but none of these states has any interest in promoting the renewal of active hostilities.

On the contrary, there remains strong international interest in stabilizing Afghanistan. UN agencies and other international organization are working hard to prevent the country from slipping back into war and chaos.

Concrete Assistance

The United States and the international community want to support the Afghan people but without providing legitimacy to the repressive Talban government. There are no easy ways to help people at the bottom without helping the government at the top. The challenge is to develop projects that provide direct support to the Afghan people with a maximum impact at the lowest levels. These projects must be compatible with the Taliban’s basic principles and, where possible, satisfy the Taliban’s general interest in overall economic development. At the same time, these projects must meet international standards of transparency so that external support does not get diverted to the Taliban’s preferred projects.

Agriculture, the main component of the Afghan economy, is badly in need of basic improvements. One obvious possibility is providing better seed stocks, increasing crop diversity, and returning to traditional crops in areas where they have been deemphasized. Water usage is also a challenge as increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall impact many areas of Afghanistan. This may require introducing more resilient crops, but even simple measures making water usage more efficient can provide significant benefits. Urban agriculture with hydroponic or aquaponic systems could also be introduced into Afghanistan, with facilities run entirely by women, which would be compatible with Taliban restrictions.

Agriculture needs a smoothly functioning support system. At the operational level, this means creating a network of reliable equipment providers and professional maintenance operations at the village level. This local network has to connect to reliable supply chains, both in supplying key ingredients such as fertilizer and in providing a route from farmer to customer, including export markets. At the high end, the support system needs to include agricultural processing. It is distressing, for example, that Afghanistan produces so much wheat but, because it has to send it abroad for processing, ends up buying foreign flour.

Opium remains a serious challenge. The previous Taliban government forbade it, but it became an important source of funds during the time of insurgency. Now that they have returned to power, the Taliban has officially condemned the drug, although practically it is difficult for them to destroy production. Fifteen years ago, there was a concerted efforted to turn opium into legitimate pharmaceutical products that are badly needed in the region. But both the U.S. and Afghan governments were against giving any legitimacy to opium, so the effort collapsed. But a new version of this approach to opium could be very attractive to sections of the current Taliban leadership as well as to international supporters.

Power generation remains a major challenge for the government, with almost total dependence on imported electricity. The most cost-effective approach is to reduce power use through increased efficiency in cities and in industries. Although earlier efforts to promote distributed local hydropower in Nangarhar province gradually faded away, the project could be revived. Solar, too, is a promising alternative for large sections of the country, as is biofuel, with a whole range of possible applications.

Education also provides a wide range of possibilities. Two are of particular interest. Afghan Education for a Better Tomorrow (AEBT) is an organization that links professors in the United States with universities in Afghanistan to provide classroom instruction at a professional level. AEBT and the Raqim Foundation also provide tele-medicine support with a satellite connection.

Transport is another area of potential foreign investment, particularly railroad expansion. A rail connection from Uzbekistan to Mazar-e-Sharif was established with help from the Asian Development Bank in 2010, but it was little used and associated rail developments languished. In 2020, another short rail link, this time from Iran into Herat, was established. Other efforts include a Five Nations Railway Corridor in the northern part of Afghanistan.

Finding Partners

There is a huge potential for projects that would directly benefit Afghans, be acceptable to the Taliban, and serve to empower local leaders and managers. The necessary starting point is assembling a local project team to identify specific projects. This team needs to discuss potential projects with local authorities and then build out a business plan, Then the team can discuss the project with potential supporters, including NGOs and international organizations. This effort needs to provide specific project outlines in some detail and with a clear route to implementation.

U.S. organizations, such as the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce, the Society of Afghan Engineers, the Society for International Development, United States, and the Grand National Movement of Afghanistan could be very helpful in this regard. Such organizations could obviously provide technical and business support. They could also assemble working groups in specific areas of interest to identify potential projects, as well as possible staff and operational support, and assist them in the development of business plans. Finally, they could publicize projects to a wider audience including the Afghan diaspora.

Watching Afghanistan slip into greater poverty, hunger, and war is not the only alternative for those outside the country. In fact, outsiders can still partner with Afghans themselves in promoting development projects that provide concrete benefits to the population but also help to empower them to pressure the Taliban for internal change.

Ed Corcoran is a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. He was a strategic analyst at the U.S. Army War College, where he chaired studies for the Office of the Deputy Chief of Operations.

The Daily Hustle: One young woman’s journey to an English course in Kabul

October 17, 2022 Analytical articles

Rama Mirzada

AQfghanistan Analysts Network

15 Oct 2022 print sharing button

For many Afghans the first year of Taleban rule was marked by uncertainty and anxiety over the country’s sudden change in fortunes. Virtually every area of daily life, from banking and shopping to travelling around the country to marriage celebrations has been affected. We wanted to find out from a variety of people how an aspect of their daily life had changed and how they were negotiating this changed landscape. In this first instalment of a new series, AAN guest author, Rama Mirzada, writes about what it has been like for her, a young woman, to overcome her fears, and the anxiety of her family, at her leaving the house to enroll in an English language course.

I’m a 23-year-old Afghan woman, ambitious and with big dreams for my own future and the future of my country. In February 2021, I returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan where I had gone for undergraduate studies. I arrived home with my BA in International Relations in hand and a long-held dream of winning a coveted place at Oxford University in the UK for post-graduate studies.

That was the plan anyway.

Months later, the old government fell and on 15 August 2021, the Taleban entered Kabul the same day and with them a new era for Afghanistan began. Overnight, our country became a harder place for a woman to pursue her dreams. In those early months, I mostly stayed at home, trying to imagine what the new Afghanistan would look like and what this sudden change would mean for my own future. Life settled into a quiet routine – working from home, reading and helping my mother with chores around the house. I even started to learn Chinese online. I would leave the house once a month, with my mother in tow, to collect my salary. But I knew this was not sustainable. I had to put my anxieties and reservations aside and properly breach the four-wall confines of our house. I needed to re-engage with the world outside, renew my social relationships, upgrade my skills and revive my plans to get a master’s degree.

So in April 2022, I bought a black hijab and announced to my family that I intended to enroll in an English language course at one of Kabul’s universities. My loving parents were understandably anxious. They tried every argument they could think of to change my mind. In Afghanistan, where decision-making is often a whole of family affair, even our relatives chimed in to dissuade me. These were uncertain times, they said, no time for a girl to travel clear across town for any reason, least of all to take an English course. My parents asked if I couldn’t find a course online or closer to home. The chorus of naysayers was loud and compelling and I had to be strong to keep up my resolve. I even fibbed a little and told them my supervisor at work wanted me to improve my English writing skills – a white lie to further the cause of my education and independence.

Finally, after weeks of negotiations, sometimes lasting well into the night, they relented. The discussions about safety measures then began. They cautioned me against talking to people I don’t know, telling people where I work, and talking politics. They even hired a driver to take me to school and back. As I was leaving the house to register, my father said: “You don’t listen to anyone’s advice. That’s why I’m not going to say anything to you on this subject ever again.”

I’m not particularly brave. On the day I went to register, I was very anxious. As the car travelled the long distance between my home and the university, my parents’ words of caution were on replay in my head, but all that disappeared as soon as I walked into the university, anxiety gave way to relief. I was energised by the staff’s welcoming attitude to the women and girls who had, like me, come to register.

There were no Talebs inside the university and if anyone judged what I was wearing, I didn’t notice. I asked the staff about the rules of attire for female students – they were not too particular about this. They stressed, instead, that the classes were segregated by gender and that there were separate areas for male and female students. Later, but only much later, we were told that a delegation from the Taleban’s Ministry of Higher Education would spend ten days on campus. They would observe classes, examine the curriculum and ensure classes were in fact segregated by gender. We were cautioned to adhere to the hijab rules as defined by the new government. They have not come to inspect our classes yet.

We faced a new problem though: our class was undersubscribed. It had not reached the minimum number of students (ten) required to convene it. Our instructors said the school would have to cancel the class because it could not run courses at a financial loss. There were relatively few female students, in sharp contrast to the boys’ classes, which according to our instructors, were oversubscribed and bursting with students.

As it turned out, the numbers in our class slowly grew. A new student one day, another two the next, until we reached the requisite 10 girls enrolled in the class. Every time a new student walked into the classroom, my classmates and I would cheer and congratulate them and each other and our spirits rallied as we saw the possibility of the course being cancelled diminish.

For most Afghans, finding the spare cash to pay for the course in the current economic environment is difficult, if not impossible. The 11,000 afghanis (about USD 125) I paid for this three-month course is equivalent to one month’s rent for the family that lives next door to us. I can bear the cost because I have a job and live at home with my parents. In a country where most families have difficulty putting food on the table. I am fully aware of my privilege.

My parents have always pushed my siblings and me to excel at school, to persevere and aim high. Sometimes, I think they care more about our education than we do ourselves. These days, my mother scours the internet for post-graduate scholarships and sends me the ones she finds, even if they are unavailable to Afghans. Their support gives me the energy to dream big and stick with it. Behind every successful person are doggedly supportive parents. This is also a privilege.

In my lifetime, Kabul has always been a city of unexpected incidents – suicide bombings, sticky bombs, roadside IEDs and kidnapping. Things go back to ‘normal’ quickly and people return to their routines – work, school, shopping, family visits – grateful if the incident has not touched them and the people they love, but heartsick with grief for their neighbours and compatriots. They make some adjustments to their routines and hope the next dreaded attack does not come.

Yet ‘the next attack’ when it came, targeted students like me – women and girls taking a mock university entrance exam at the Kaaj Higher Education Centre in Dasht-e Barchi – a district in west Kabul inhabited mostly by Hazara Shia Muslims on 30 September 2022. Some 60 people, mostly women and girls, were killed in the attack.

The morning after, as I prepared to leave for school, I could read the concern in my parents’ eyes, but there was no longer any question of my not continuing with the course. In our house, the issue had already been debated and decided. And now after the attack, the stakes were even higher; people were taking to the streets in Afghanistan and abroad to protest against what they consider to be a genocide of Hazaras. Women and girls who, like me, are in education have a role to play in defining the future for ourselves and our daughters. Our job is to keep going.

There were fewer people at the university that morning. Only half of my classmates showed up. All were, no doubt, concerned about the possibility of a similar attack against our school. In the days that followed, students slowly started showing up for class and by the end of the week, the numbers were nearly back to normal.

We continue to arrive every morning on a campus segregated by gender. Although there are no male students in the building when female classes are in session – except for the instructors and university staff, who are mostly male – female students must leave the campus immediately after their classes end. Coaxed by the guards to make haste and vacate the premises, we make way for male students to enter the campus 30 minutes after our classes are dismissed. This doesn’t leave much time for us to get to know our classmates or have side conversations outside the classroom. But, for now, sharing space in a classroom where we can learn together is enough.

Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark

Barnett Rubin: Counter-Terrorism ‘High Priority’ for US

October 17, 2022 Analytical articles

Banafsha Binesh

Tolo News

17 Oct 2022

WHAT AFGHANS WANT THE REST OF THE WORLD TO KNOW

October 15, 2022 Analytical articles

By Bushra Seddique

The Atlantic

OCTOBER 9, 2022

The country is, once again, the worst place in the world to be a woman.

Hajera gave birth to her daughter, Sarah, in Kabul two weeks after the Taliban took over Afghanistan last summer. Hajera is 35 and worked as a government economist. She and her husband already had two sons and were happy to be welcoming a daughter. But they soon lost their jobs, and the Taliban erased the rights women had gained over the previous two decades.

An Afghan women’s-rights activist had connected me with Hajera, who was too afraid to share her last name. “We had a job,” she told me. “We had money. We had a home. We had a country. We had a family.” Now, she said, “we have nothing.”

Afghanistan is, once again, the worst place in the world to be a woman.

I asked her: What did she hope would happen now? “Hich omid nist,” she said. There is no hope.

I was born in 1999, two years before the September 11 attacks and the subsequent invasion of my country. For Afghan women, the overthrow of the Taliban marked the beginning of a luckier time. Schools were opened to girls. Women were no longer imprisoned at home—they were allowed to work, and would no longer be beaten if they chose not to wear the burqa.

Freedom came too late for my mother and her generation. They had prayed and protested for these rights. But many were married off as children. My mother was married at 16. Our mothers and grandmothers refer to these times as the “unblessed years.”

Now that the time of unblessing has returned, it has become clear that as we grew up, my generation was witnessing not the beginning of a new future, but an anomalous moment in our country’s sad history. We had been enthusiastic, energetic, happy, and hopeful. On August 15, 2021, Afghanistan returned to zero. Or even less than zero, because the path to freedom feels even longer and more dangerous now, and Afghan women are so very tired.

I am a refugee in the United States now, but I have been talking with my family and friends, with former teachers and colleagues, to understand what they have been going through and what they want the rest of the world to know.

Faryal is a 14-year-old girl in Kabul. As with many of the women I spoke with for this story, I’m using only her first name to protect her privacy. She should be in ninth grade this year at Hussain Khail High School, where she loved her classes, even though the students had no chairs or tables and studied in hot, overcrowded tents. She used to wake up every morning and leave for school with her 12-year-old brother, but now she watches from the window as he boards the bus. She stays home all day, doing nothing, looking at her old books.

Soon after returning to power last year, the Taliban banned secondary school for girls. The Ministry of Education indicated that these schools would reopen once the Taliban settled on a dress code for female students and teachers “in accordance with Islamic law and Afghan culture and traditions.” But everyone knows it was a lie.

Faryal told me she misses her friends and the playground, where they would braid one another’s hair. She asked me with a crying voice questions I couldn’t answer. Why have they only closed our schools, not the boys’ schools? Are the Taliban at war with women?

Not everyone is waiting for the Taliban to open the schools. Some people are running secret schools for girls out of their homes. One person told me that she knew of at least two such schools in Kabul and three or four elsewhere in the country, but there may be many more.

Recently, I spoke with a teacher at one of these secret schools. Ayesha Farhat Safi, 22, teaches roughly 80 teenage girls in the basement of her family’s house in Kabul. She doesn’t make any money doing it, and she could be arrested or beaten. She told me, “A lot of students are reaching out to us, but we don’t have enough space to have them all participate, and it hurts me.”

NPR and other news organizations have reported on female students’ attempts to get around the ban. Some schools that teach young girls legally are secretly instructing teenagers as well. When Taliban inspectors visit the schools, the older girls scatter and hide.

None of these secret schools is close enough to where Faryal lives for her to attend. But she knows of them, and dreams about going to one someday. She told me she doesn’t care if the Taliban catch her.

Ispoke with a 26-year-old woman who, until the government fell, had worked for the Ministry of Education, analyzing national enrollment data. She loved her job and the difference she was making in the country. Now she has no job, and many of the schools she watched open have been closed. She told me she feels small and weak, an “observer of the miseries of women.”

Her former colleagues at the ministry have told her that many teachers who taught in girls’ schools have been reassigned to teach boys. Others have left the country. She has had many opportunities to leave, but she doesn’t want to go. She teaches English classes for girls and women, as well as classes in computer coding and other technical skills. Some are streamed online, but others are in person. She told me that her girls gather in a secret location where they pretend to be studying the Quran and Sharia. She believes that the only way we can help Afghan women is to empower them through education. She told me, “I want to stay until it becomes impossible for me to stay.”

Saira Saba, 42, is a former teacher too. She helped organize a protest in August in front of the Ministry of Education, in Kabul, and held a sign reading bread, work, freedom. News reports said about 40 women participated in the protest, though Saba told me there were even more: mothers and daughters, women who’d never learned to read and women who’d worked as professors at universities.

Saba participated despite knowing that the Taliban were arresting and beating female protesters. She said, “We want a country where we have our rights. We want a country where we will be able to work. We want a country where we know who our president is and who our leaders are. And where we have the right to choose our own leaders.”

Of course, it’s not only women who are suffering in Afghanistan. The Taliban are also targeting religious and ethnic minority groups. The economy is paralyzed; the health-care system has broken down; people are starving.

Recently my mother told me that she was walking back from the bakery with three loaves of bread when she decided to share the food with some beggars she passed by. But there were far more hungry people than there were loaves of bread. She says there are more beggars now than she can ever remember seeing in Kabul, and more kids on the streets than in schools.

We lost our freedom of speech the same day we lost our country. There is no constitution, and Taliban commanders set up their own courts to judge individuals on whatever charges they want, whenever they want. Terrorists are finding a haven in Afghanistan, and deadly bombings of civilians in mosques and markets have increased.

But the fear and oppression are worse for Afghan women, because they can’t fight back; they’ve been systematically removed from society, imprisoned in their homes once again. My conversations with the friends I grew up with get shorter and less cheerful each time we speak. They have stopped planning for their futures—they can see that there is no future. Some of them have accepted the first marriage proposal that came their way, no matter who it came from, because they think their only escape from their current circumstances is to find a husband.

My sister’s closet is filled with colorful clothing. But when she goes out she can only wear black; she says it’s like the whole nation is in mourning, and the people in the streets look like zombies. She used to wear lipstick and eyeliner; she no longer bothers, because she knows no one will look her in the eyes. She says that, covering her face wherever she goes, she has forgotten what she even looks like.

It would be nice to think that, in the privacy of their own homes, women have remained free; that they could turn their back on an oppressive government that doesn’t see them as fully human, and continue, at least in their own personal relationships, to be who they’ve always been. But that’s not the case. By removing women from the public sphere, the government has also reestablished the patriarchy within the home, where men are once again judge and jury.

I want to believe that there’s something to be done—that foreign governments or institutions or refugees like myself could somehow help the women back home. The United Nations has restricted the travel of some Taliban leaders. The United States has imposed sanctions on Afghanistan to pressure the Taliban to create a democratic government in which women and other minorities have equal rights. It has also frozen $7 billion of Afghan money in U.S. banks, and announced that it will use about half of that for a fund to support the Afghan economy, in ways that will help the people without enriching the government.

But human-rights activists are calling for more penalties. The UN could ban all Taliban leaders from traveling; Twitter could cut off access (as Facebook has done already) to the official Taliban accounts as well as those operated by anyone lobbying on the Taliban’s behalf. Additional humanitarian aid could be provided on the condition that women are allowed to work, go to secondary school, and participate in politics. Governments and nonprofit groups could help women’s-rights activists by providing financial support and political backing. They could also set up and fund online education and more secret in-person schools.

Afghanistan is not far from becoming the country we were in the Taliban’s first regime. But some things are different now. Few in rural communities have access to the internet, but those who do can organize and resist in new ways. In secret, behind closed doors, Afghanistan is still breathing.

Hajera told me there was no hope. I want to believe that there is a little.

Bushra Seddique is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic.

Iran’s Protests … and the Afghan Sisters Next Door

October 14, 2022 Analytical articles

Iran’s women are seizing worldwide admiration with 26 days of courageous defiance against their authoritarian government’s violent confinement of females as second-class citizens who may not freely work, marry, divorce, travel or even be seen with their heads uncovered. Less noted are this audacious movement’s existing, and potential, connections to the tenacious, 14-month campaign by Afghan women resisting the even tighter oppression of the Taliban. Street protest slogans, social media posts and other links illustrate a synergy between the movements that both should use in the difficult task of converting their inspiring courage into real change.

Afghan women protest Taliban rule in Kabul in August before gunmen dispersed them with gunfire into the air. Women have continued to resist a gradually tightening Taliban crackdown against them. (Kiana Hayeri/The New York Times)

Iran’s Unprecedented Uprising

Iran’s widened protests this week, including workers’ strikes and Iran’s vital oil sector, underscore that its women are now leading the most potent challenge in years to the authoritarian rule by clerics and their allied security forces. The uprising began as a protest against the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in the hands of Iran’s morality police, who arrested her on a Tehran street for allowing some of her hair to stray from beneath the head scarf that her government requires all women to wear in public.

“Protest chants about her death quickly evolved into calls to oust the regime,” USIP fellow and Iran specialist Robin Wright wrote this week. They began chanting “‘Death to the Dictator,’ and ‘Our disgrace is our incompetent leader,’ and ‘We don’t want the Islamic Republic.’” In a default response, Iran’s security forces, such as the Basij militia, have attacked protesters, multiplying popular anger. As of Tuesday, those attacks have killed 185 protesters, including 19 children, reports the monitoring group Iran Human Rights.

Iranian women have protested Iran’s narrow, discriminatory theocracy since the 1979 revolution that erected it in place of the ruling monarchy. Indeed, Wright notes, “The first protest after the ouster of the shah was a women’s rally demonstrating against the imposition of conservative Islamic dress. … Women led much of the 2009 Green Movement protests against an allegedly fraudulent presidential election, chanting ‘Where’s my vote?’ and ‘Death to the Dictator!’”

Iranians’ demands for reform have grown stronger in recent years and news accounts, tracked by USIP’s Iran Primer, reflect how the current uprising has won unprecedented support from a broad swath of Iranian society.

Afghanistan, Iran: Sisters’ Synergy

Like other nonviolent protest movements of the past decade, in Sudan, Tunisia, Libya, Myanmar and elsewhere, the Afghan and Iranian women’s campaigns are using social media as vital amplifiers. Despite their governments’ obstructions of the internet, the two movements can share ideas more quickly because both can discuss them in the Persian language. Women demonstrators in both countries have been using the same Persian-language slogan — “Zan, Zindagi, Azadi” (“Women, Life, Liberty!”) — against their governments’ efforts to control their bodies and choices.

An Iranian protest group called Khiaban Tribune, which is painting street graffiti as part of the protests, last week posted its support for Afghan women, who have defied arrests, beatings and other violence by the restored Taliban regime. The Iranian group declared, “we are both fighting … against a Taliban.” Activist writer Masih Alinejad and other Iranian women campaigners have echoed the comparison between the two countries’ regimes and women’s responses.

Over the 20 years in which a U.S.-led international intervention held Afghanistan’s Taliban out of power, millions of Afghan women won greater freedoms to study, pursue careers and hold public roles in society. Women served as judges and provincial or district governors, headed four national government ministries, held between 20 and 30 percent of parliament seats (compared to about 6 percent in Iran), and ran for president and vice president. A generation of Afghan women built a foundation of experience and skills that they are now using to resist the re-imposition of misogynist oppression by the new Taliban regime, winning local-level concessions from officials in various provinces who are relaxing enforcement against women’s activities to avoid drawing public protest.

A throng of countries offered years of support for Afghan women’s struggles via government aid programs, civil society campaigns, TV talk shows, parliament sessions and national and international conferences. Many Iranian women’s rights activists lament that their own movement has had vastly less international support. But with the Taliban’s return and Iran’s crisis, the two women’s movements are sharing — and can increase — much-needed support for each other.

Afghans’ Continued Resistance

Retaking power in August 2021, the Taliban quickly replaced Afghanistan’s women’s affairs ministry with a “Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” an organ that was highly oppressive during the Taliban’s 1990s rule. Taliban spokesmen protest to the international community that their regime intends to moderate past oppressions and respect women’s basic rights, but Taliban actions have steadily tightened restrictions. In the past six months, the regime has:

Dissolved the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, for years the nation’s most prominent human rights authority and long directed by women.
Ordered women to cover their faces in public.
Halted the issuance of driving licenses to women and banned women from using public transportation unless accompanied by a close male relative, called a mahram. The Taliban’s restored Ministry of Vice and Virtue ordered bus drivers to install curtains to close off the designated seats for women in buses.
Ordered schoolgirls in the fourth to sixth grades in Ghazni province to cover their faces while walking to or from school, or to face expulsion.
Banned women from going to public parks where authorities cannot ensure segregation between men and women.
Instructed women employees of the Finance Ministry, in phone calls to each one personally, to send male relatives to their offices to replace them.

Afghan women began a wave of protests in the days after the Taliban seizure of power, rallying in the capital, Kabul, and in towns across many provinces, including Balkh, Herat, Kunduz, Baghlan, Takhar, Kapisa, Panjshir and Bamyan. Taliban enforcers beat protesters with batons and arrested them, both women and men. They also arrested protesters’ family members. Under this assault, women this year began holding smaller protests. Fourteen months on, women are gathering in offices or homes to produce photos and videos in which, masked for security, they present speeches and signs with their demands for justice and then share them via text messages, WhatsApp, Twitter or Facebook.

Still, Afghan women also continue to defy the Taliban with periodic public rallies, including street protests this month against an increase under Taliban rule of attacks and hate speech against Afghanistan’s ethnic Hazara minority, who are adherents of Islam’s Shia sect, which also is a minority in a country dominated by Sunni Islam. These latest rallies condemned a horrific September 30 bombing in Kabul that killed more than 35 ethnic Hazara girls and women at a school. The women activists in Iran, a Shia-majority country, have joined Afghan women in specifically condemning the attacks on the Hazaras. As both the Iranian and Afghan authoritarian regimes suppress ethnic and religious minorities as well as women, the two women’s movements should strengthen efforts at building coalitions with other marginalized communities to more powerfully press for real democratic change.

In both countries, some religious clerics have supported the demands of women that authorities stop using force to require women to adhere to government requirements that they cover their hair or faces. In Iran, these include former president Mohammad Khatami. In Afghanistan a group of 15 religious scholars published a statement via social media that called such coverings a moral choice rather than a subject of criminal law.

In the past month, Afghan women have drawn their own inspiration from Iranians’ protests. On September 29, about 25 Afghan women activists protested outside Iran’s embassy in Kabul, waving signs declaring, “Iran has risen, now it’s our turn!” and “From Kabul to Iran, say no to dictatorship!” the AFP news agency reported. Taliban gunmen soon arrived and unleashed volleys of automatic rifle fire to disperse the group.

Building a Sisterhood

One lesson that Afghan women may be drawing from Iran’s protest movement is the need to bolster the support they receive from men in their communities. Afghan men — district-level officials and elders in Kandahar, Paktia, Parwan and Baghlan provinces, for example — have joined women in pushing for the resumption of girls’ schooling that has been halted by the Taliban. But Afghan women have noted the much greater prominence of men publicly with women in Iran’s protests and have said the same is needed in Afghanistan.

Alongside mutual encouragement, the Afghan and Iranian women’s rights campaigns can offer each other complementary elements of support. Afghans provide an example and experience of managing a longer, lower-profile resistance movement under the extremely harsh repression of the Taliban. And with the reduced global attention to Afghanistan following last year’s withdrawal of international troops and most government and non-government assistance programs, it is the Iranians who are galvanizing world attention right now for the goals that the two movements share.

It is only natural that two communities tied by language, culture and their oppression by authoritarianism masquerading as religious faith, are finding synergies. With women in both Iran and Afghanistan facing crisis and opportunity, it is time to strengthen their connections. Whether in person, or on the cellphone screens that feed millions of women and girls in these neighboring countries with emotional support, organizational ideas and clearer visions for their future, Afghan and Iranian women must now all the more strengthen each other as sisters.

How Western Errors Let the Taliban Win in Afghanistan

October 3, 2022 Analytical articles

Stefano Pontecorvo

Foreign Policy

OCTOBER 2, 2022

NATO’s last man in Kabul helped facilitate the airlift and had a front-row seat to the Taliban takeover of the capital.

At 6:21 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 27, 2021, NATO’s Afghan adventure formally ended. At that moment, the Italian C-130 on which I was flying as the last representative of the Atlantic Alliance to leave the country crossed the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. For the first time in 20 years, Afghanistan was without a NATO presence.

We had left behind just under 7,000 U.S. and British soldiers, under national command, who would soon withdraw after having destroyed all the sensitive material left at Kabul’s airport, following the chaotic evacuation of Afghan personnel. We left the country and left it badly—in the hands of the same Taliban we had thrown out of power in just a few weeks 20 years earlier. And we left a country that had believed in us, condemning Afghans once again to a very different future from the one we had given them a glimpse of.

The U.S. and NATO exit from Afghanistan may seem simply an episodic defeat. In a broader context, however, the Afghan withdrawal adds to a series of U.S. failures, from Lebanon to the Arab Spring, Iraq, Somalia, Syria—all these adventures ended badly, and the situation left behind was worse. We find ourselves today with the same security problems we had 20 years ago.

The collapse began well before the tragic events of July and August 2021. The Afghan state and its economic and social fabric were progressively disintegrating under the weight of endemic corruption, weak democratic institutions, and political mistakes the West had committed and allowed others to commit.

The constant calls for an early withdrawal from Afghanistan made by successive U.S. presidents and European leaders over the past 20 years convinced the Taliban and their supporters, but above all the Afghan people, that the West did not collectively have the determination necessary to carry out the task.

The signing, on Feb. 29, 2020, of the Doha Agreement between the United States and the Taliban, which sanctioned the withdrawal of foreign forces from the country, was the beginning of the end for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

The Doha Agreement, controversial since its negotiation, had the explosive effect for Afghanistan of formalizing a precise date for the end of the international military presence in the country, which was the only element capable of keeping the system in that condition of unstable equilibrium to which the authorities and the population had become accustomed and which had held in check the growing Taliban activity that the Afghan security forces were unable to defeat on their own.

This article is adapted from L’ultimo aereo da Kabul: Cronaca di una missione impossibile (The Last Plane From Kabul: Chronicle of an Impossible Mission) by Stefano Pontecorvo (Piemme, 320 pp., €18.50, June 2022). This article is adapted from L’ultimo aereo da Kabul: Cronaca di una missione impossibile (The Last Plane From Kabul: Chronicle of an Impossible Mission) by Stefano Pontecorvo (Piemme, 320 pp., €18.50, June 2022).

The deal was presented as a peace agreement, but it was always clearly aimed at allowing the withdrawal of U.S. (and international) forces by securing them against Taliban attacks.

Contrary to the wise practice of negotiating from a position of strength, the United States entered the negotiations from a position of relative weakness, given the imperative to find a way to safely leave the country within a relatively short time frame.

The effect of the agreement was profoundly disruptive as it definitively broke the balance of power in Afghanistan in favor of the Taliban, from whom nothing was asked except the safety of U.S. and allied troops and anti-terrorism guarantees that were more cosmetic than real.

The agreement also signaled to the Taliban and to the Afghan population that the United States and the West did not have the determination and strategic patience to finish the work that had started with the 2001 invasion and carry out the plan for a peaceful Afghanistan.

In this environment, the announcement on April 14, 2021, that U.S. President Joe Biden had decided to go ahead with the U.S. withdrawal kneecapped the Doha talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, which continued for a short time before being suspended altogether.

Between the initial announcement of the U.S. withdrawal in February 2020 and the confirmation of its date by the new U.S. administration in April 2021, there had been an evolution in the sentiment of the Afghan population toward the United States and NATO—and our Afghan colleagues were no exception. Rather than friends and benefactors, we were now portrayed as untrustworthy and, more and more openly, as traitors.

By July 2021, the Taliban were confident and on the offensive. The pace of the Taliban conquest of the country was impressive. On June 25, the Taliban controlled 99 of the 412 districts in the country; by July 14, they controlled 218. Taliban fighters stopped on the outskirts of Kabul for a couple of days, not only to wait for the finalization of the agreement that was emerging but also because of the instructions given by the Taliban’s senior leadership council, the Quetta Shura, which wanted the Taliban leaders of Kandahar and of the South to take possession of Kabul.

Still, Western officials did not expect the Afghan government to flee or for Kabul to fall so quickly. Indeed, a memorandum marked “For Official Use Only”—drawn up following a coordination meeting of the U.S. National Security Council on the afternoon of Aug. 14 and later leaked to the press—gives a snapshot of the dramatic lack of preparedness with which Washington faced the evacuation.

As Taliban forces entered Kabul and approached the presidential palace on Aug. 15, President Ashraf Ghani abruptly fled the capital in a helicopter bound for Uzbekistan. The news of the president’s flight, which spread like wildfire, immediately led to the few remaining Afghan guards abandoning their posts together with the staff of the civilian airport, which by the afternoon was completely unguarded. Eight Taliban arrived a few hours later, apparently out of curiosity—but then stayed and took possession of it—settling down to drink tea and Coca-Cola in the VIP room on the ground floor.

On the evening of Aug. 16, given the lack of a U.S. guarantee to secure the capital, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in agreement with Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the High Council for National Reconciliation, invited the Taliban to enter Kabul to “protect the population and prevent the country and the city falling into chaos.”

To say that the evacuation took place in a surreal atmosphere is an understatement. The planning that the various countries, starting with the United States, had belatedly put in place collided with a reality that no one had imagined, the disappearance of the Republic already in mid-August, putting us in a situation for which, consequently, no one was ready.

As often happens, there was a discrepancy between the realism of the intelligence services and the military and the picture that is painted at the political level. As late as July 8, 2021, Biden was publicly declaring that the Afghan government was unlikely to fall, whereas the coalition military did not hide that the Afghan state was shaky and the armed forces were not in a position to fight. These signals were clearly provided to the U.S. leadership and to the other members of the coalition, who reacted in opposite ways: Washington insisting on the withdrawal and the others calling for a revision of conditions and dates.

Meanwhile, the crowd had grown around the airport and became unmanageable in the absence of any control. The few government guards had vanished, and the Taliban had not yet ventured to the military part of the airport. When they arrived, we noticed it, not because the crowd became more orderly but because the only way the Taliban knew to keep people at bay was to shoot rounds upon rounds of bullets in the air.

The unease was increased by the fact that we had no knowledge of what was happening outside the walls and of the developments regarding the timing of operations, which largely depended on the decisions that would be made in Washington. In Kabul, the Americans were grappling with the sheer size of the problem they had on their hands and struggling to reorganize the evacuation and the consular functions at the airport that they could no longer perform in the city.

Planes of various nationalities, scattered in the region among the Gulf, Pakistan, and neighboring countries, waited for passengers who could not get through the airport gates. The troops did their best, but the planes, including the U.S. ones, took off empty or nearly empty.

The U.S. bases in the Gulf became refugee camps, set up quickly, in which those who were evacuated were herded for weeks in makeshift facilities with temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

I did the seemingly simpler thing. On the basis of the needs expressed, I organized a coordination meeting, inviting the ambassadors and the heads of the military contingents of all the countries involved, for 4 p.m. on Aug. 15. Everyone came, including the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and all delegations present in the airport.

From that point, it was a continuous negotiation among the Americans, British, and others. I spent my days and often nights in contact with colleagues and military representatives of the various contingents to smooth out any misunderstanding that could risk disturbing the cooperation I was trying to foster and without which we would have risked leaving most of our Afghan colleagues behind. The atmosphere improved as the hours passed, the numbers of people leaving began to rise, and we soon started to see results as planes filled and took off.

The images of the thousands of desperate Afghans crowding around the airport gates trying to get in to board a plane to a different life will remain etched in our collective memory for a long time.

Was it supposed to end like this? Not necessarily. The epilogue of the Afghan intervention constitutes the final stage of a series of other Western misadventures that ended in almost the same way, starting from Vietnam onward, in which the common threads are always the same.

Stefano Pontecorvo was NATO’s last senior civilian representative for Afghanistan. In his last days in Kabul, he helped coordinate the airlift through which more than 124,000 Afghans who worked with NATO allies and partner countries were evacuated. In his 40-year diplomatic career, he has served as Italian ambassador to Pakistan and as deputy head of mission at the Italian embassies in Moscow and London.

Afghan Resistance Leaders See ‘No Option’ but War

October 1, 2022 Analytical articles

By Lynne O’Donnell

Foreign Policy

SEPTEMBER 29, 2022, 2:44 PM

But first they must present a united front to win the support they need to dislodge the Taliban.

Afghanistan is now perhaps the most dangerous country in the world, controlled by Taliban terrorists who are sheltering dozens of anti-Western jihadi groups while torturing, raping, starving, and killing their Afghan opponents. Yet the one person who could make a credible claim to be the leader of an opposition group to overthrow the Taliban has been unable to draw international support or unite fellow Afghans behind him.

Ahmad Massoud, the 33-year-old son of an anti-Taliban war hero, leads the National Resistance Front (NRF), which is concentrated in the Panjshir Valley, a lush and mountainous province close to the capital, Kabul, where the Taliban have been struggling to dislodge them in the year since they took control of Afghanistan. The NRF is one of at least 22 resistance groups the United Nations says have emerged since the Taliban’s takeover last year. A few thousand men are fighting in disparate groups, taking and holding territory in a dozen provinces mainly across the north, where anti-Taliban sentiment is strongest. But they’ve yet to form a cohesive opposition to the Taliban, who have an increasingly tenuous hold on power as factional feuds emerge and international legitimacy remains elusive.

Not that the Afghan resistance is getting any help from Washington. The Biden administration has insisted it will not support an armed opposition and seems to regard the Taliban—led by dozens of sanctioned terrorists—as partners in counterterrorism rather than part of the problem.

Despite repeated warnings of the Taliban’s long-standing relationship with al Qaeda and its affiliates, the world only just awoke to the danger, Massoud said, when a U.S. drone killed al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a Kabul villa associated with Taliban deputy leader and interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani.

“Now the world is paying attention,” Massoud told Foreign Policy during a recent trip to Europe. “Afghanistan is turning into a hub for terrorism. And the goal of this terrorism is not to only have Afghanistan; the idea is to spread worldwide.” Afghanistan is a recruitment and training center, he said, where terrorist groups teach skills like bomb-making “in the languages of Central Asia.” The killing of Zawahiri, he said, brought home to countries like Qatar, Pakistan, Russia, China, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan that “the export of terrorism has already started.”

Like many Afghans, Massoud finds it difficult to understand U.S. policy toward the Taliban. “It’s very confusing and will leave a very bad stain on the reputation of the United States as a great country which always stands for great values,” he said. “I believe it is happening because it is cheaper [than an armed presence], but it is a catastrophic mistake.” He pointed to the consequences from the last time Washington ignored a Taliban power grab in the 1990s: A few years later, the Taliban’s guest, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, launched the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

“We had the experience in the ’90s of not paying attention to the situation. And it can be catastrophic again,” he said.

Massoud’s inability to forge a united opposition in the year since the Taliban’s takeover isn’t due to a lack of name recognition. Massoud regularly invokes the name of his late father, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who led the Northern Alliance in its fight to keep substantial swaths of territory out of Taliban hands the last time they ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. The elder Massoud was assassinated by al Qaeda two days before the huge attacks on the United States that sparked the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and the ousting of the Taliban.

After the fall of the Afghan republic, he said he tried and failed to negotiate his inclusion into Afghanistan’s government with Taliban leaders. He is now based, alongside other NRF figures, in neighboring Tajikistan, from where he travels widely to drum up support, arms, and money. But he has assumed a Ernesto “Che” Guevara air rather than becoming the fulcrum of an effective anti-Taliban opposition.

And there are blocks to build on. In many regions of the country, the NRF fights alongside the Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF), which is led by Lt. Gen. Yasin Zia, a former Afghan deputy defense minister and chief of the general staff. Like Massoud, he travels widely, pleading the case for support to dislodge the Taliban. But he describes a Catch-22: Without victories, the resistance cannot attract arms and funding; without arms and funding, victory over the Taliban will be difficult.

Demonstrating the fundamental problem of the anti-Taliban resistance, Zia said he and Massoud have not met. Massoud and Zia stand out as patriotic democrats, but neither have grabbed the imagination of Afghanistan’s war-weary people or governments whose support they need to win a war both say is now the only option.

“We could win a big uprising, but only if we come together,” Zia said. “Brother Massoud” has the ability, charisma, and recognition inside and outside Afghanistan to build a team. “Anti-Taliban groups say they are working for the good of the people. We all say that we want democracy; there is no difference between us and our aims. But if we work individually and independently, it will take too long. Only by bringing our resources together will we be able to bring changes on the ground.” Along with others who claim to have the best interest of their country at heart, it seems they’re just too busy pursuing their own interests to pool resources—an enduring condition of Afghan leadership that arguably led to the fall of the republic.

Despite the Biden administration’s hands-off approach, both NRF and AFF leaders say they are getting some support. Both are attracting former members of the U.S.- and NATO-trained Afghan army, special forces, and police, as well as financial support from diaspora Afghans. And on Capitol Hill, there has been a smattering of support for the Afghan resistance among top lawmakers, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has advocated for both Massoud and his NRF colleague, former Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh.

But Massoud and Saleh recently met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an effort to build a regional support base, according to a source who accompanied them, in a move that could lead to a backlash for the resistance in Europe and on Capitol Hill, as Russia’s war in Ukraine deepens economic hardship for hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Still, the Taliban’s support for terror is wiping off any lingering smiles among countries that cheered the Taliban’s rise and America’s ignominious departure. Pakistan supported the Taliban’s insurgency, but it is now a target of their terrorist partner Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, which seeks the overthrow of the Pakistani state and enjoys safe haven in Afghanistan. China’s demand that the Taliban eliminate the anti-Beijing Turkistan Islamic Party (formerly the East Turkestan Islamic Movement) has gone unheeded. Central Asia fears a variety of Taliban allies, including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Jamaat Ansarullah, which targets Tajikistan. But none of this has stopped China, Russia, and Pakistan from pursuing economic opportunities with the Taliban, their lack of legitimacy notwithstanding. Russia just inked a provisional deal on oil, gas, and wheat supplies; China is keen on minerals, including gold, uranium, and lithium; and Pakistan is getting cheap coal.

Even as he struggles to win international support and unify the resistance, Massoud said the Taliban “leave us with no option” but war.

“I believe that even with the slightest support of the world, we will be able to liberate some portion of our country because the people are not happy. The people are not with the Taliban,” Massoud said. “By establishing a fair, just, democratic system that will be a role model for the rest of the country and attract internal migration so people do not have to leave Afghanistan, this will encourage more people to rise against the Taliban’s tyranny and authoritarianism. Then resistance will continue and will grow stronger.”

Lynne O’Donnell is a columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author. She was the Afghanistan bureau chief for Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press between 2009 and 2017.

Biden to Drip-Feed Afghanistan Its $3.5 Billion in Frozen Reserves

September 29, 2022 Analytical articles

By Lynne O’Donnell
Foreign Policy
SEPTEMBER 20, 2022

The decision by the United States to release $3.5 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank reserves has sparked fears that the money will hand a jackpot to the Taliban, which have presided over the country’s slide into dire economic crisis since they took over more than a year ago. The money is to be transferred to an international financial institution based in Switzerland and administered by a group including former Afghan central bankers.

After months of back-and-forth conversations over whether—and how—to disburse at least a portion of the funds belonging to the former Afghan government that were frozen in the United States after the Taliban took over last year, the Biden administration has hit on a solution that pleases no one.

The United States has set up the Afghan Fund at the Bank for International Settlements in an effort to kick-start the economy before the winter exacerbates alarming levels of hunger and poverty. The U.S. Treasury said the money will help pay Afghanistan’s debts and bills, keeping the economy afloat, while critics said it will simply transfer liability for payments from the Taliban to the Afghan Fund.

Omar Joya, an economist formerly with the World Bank and Afghanistan’s central bank, described the Afghan Fund as a “windfall” for the Taliban, saying it effectively pays their bills while relieving them of responsibility for managing an economy suffering from the political shock of the republic’s fall as well as natural disasters that have disrupted agricultural production and supply chains.

“Transferring part of the reserves to a fund to finance humanitarian projects and reduce the fiscal pressures from the Taliban will not help much with the ongoing economic recession and crisis,” Joya said. “On the contrary, it will further support the Taliban leaders by easing fiscal pressures and providing them with windfall gains. Nothing will change for the poor. They will continue to cope with lack of jobs, no source of income, deprivation, soaring food prices.”

The Taliban, too, oppose the Afghan Fund, saying all central bank reserves—$7 billion held in the United States and $2 billion held in Europe and the Middle East—should be transferred to the central bank under their management.

“Foreign currency reserves belong to the people of Afghanistan and have been used for many years in light of the law for monetary stability, strengthening the financial system, and facilitating trade with the world,” said Habiburahman Habib, the Taliban’s economy ministry spokesperson. “Any action of the United States regarding the allocation, use, and transfer of the country’s foreign currency reserves is unacceptable, and we want to reconsider this matter.”

But the Taliban’s earlier brutality and their proven inability to govern since they took power ensured that the United States would not release the funds into the hands of a group run by terrorists. The Afghan government previously relied on international aid for around 80 percent of its revenue, but that has largely evaporated. Without income, people cannot buy staples, leading to documented reports of people selling children and body parts to feed their families. But the Taliban refused to comply with U.S. conditions for the release of the funds, including international anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing measures, as well as independent oversight and auditing.

The Biden administration views the Afghan Fund as a sort of shock-absorber meant to keep the lights on and the credit rating passable. “The Afghan Fund will protect, preserve, and make targeted disbursements of that $3.5 billion to help provide greater stability to the Afghan economy. The Taliban are not a part of the Afghan Fund, and robust safeguards have been put in place to prevent the funds from being used for illicit activity,” the U.S. Treasury and State Departments said. “Disbursements from the Afghan Fund could include keeping Afghanistan current on its debt payments to international financial institutions, which would preserve their eligibility for development assistance, and paying for critical imports, such as electricity.”

But that still frees up funds for the Taliban, Joya argued. Under the current arrangement, the national electricity bill will be paid directly from the fund, meaning the Taliban can keep the money collected from customers by the state power company.

“The newly transferred $3.5 billion to the Afghan Fund must be recalled back and must remain with the frozen assets. They are supposed to function as foreign exchange reserves to facilitate payments for international transactions, not to fund or finance fiscal obligations or humanitarian operations,” Joya said.

The central bank’s assets were frozen when the Taliban took control on Aug. 15, 2021: As the country came under the control of sanctioned terrorists, business as usual was not an option. Ordinary people have not been able to access their own bank accounts, though some private banks have continued to operate payrolls and other functions. The World Bank has projected a decline in real GDP by one-third between the end of 2020 and the end of this year, saying around 70 percent of households cannot meet basic needs, including food.

The yearlong saga over the release of the funds has been controversial. Some Afghans accused the Biden administration of stealing from Afghanistan’s people. Many more were concerned the Taliban would find a way to seize the money, as they have seized much of the aid that has been funneled to the country since they took control. “It will be smoked inside a year, and then where will we be?” asked the head of a local charity, speaking anonymously, who described the Taliban pilfering international food and other aid over the past year.

The big debate is whether the fund is meant to fulfill traditional tasks of central bank reserves or act as a rainy day fund. Shah Mehrabi, a long-term member of the Supreme Council of Afghanistan’s central bank, said its priorities are inflation reduction and stabilizing the currency. Mehrabi is one of two Afghan economists on the four-strong board of the Afghan Fund; the other two are Swiss and American.

He said he wants to do auctions of U.S. dollars to the tune of $150 million a month to inject hard currency into the economy and take out afghanis, which are driving up prices. Aid salaries have injected some dollars into the economy, which have helped stabilize the currency, but they haven’t taken any local currency out, which is why inflation is still above 50 percent. But he has some conditions.

“Funds will only be released if conditions are met,” including halting a “brain drain” with the employment of competent technocrats to run the financial institutions, currency auctions, and independent monitoring, he said. “We will look at this as we go, and once we have access to economic data collected by the current regime, we will have a better idea.”

Abdullah Khenjani, a journalist and Afghanistan’s former deputy minister for peace, said the “unilateral” U.S. decision to set up the Afghan Fund “means that there is no common ground to seek and reach a rational decision with the Taliban regime,” which has not been held accountable for excesses like extrajudicial killings and banning education for girls.

Reserves are meant to backstop the banking system and the national currency, Khenjani said, not to pay power bills. “In the long term, it will be a disaster, another ingredient in the recipe of the failing Afghanistan economy,” he added.

Lynne O’Donnell is a columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author. She was the Afghanistan bureau chief for Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press between 2009 and 2017.

Taxing the Afghan Nation: What the Taleban’s pursuit of domestic revenues means for citizens, the economy and the state

September 29, 2022 Analytical articles

Kate Clark

Afghanistan Analysts Network

28 Sep 2022 print sharing button

On 15 August 2021, much in Afghanistan was overturned or radically altered. The insurgents became the rulers and the old elites fled. Afghanistan’s relationship with the rest of the world ruptured and the country became poorer overnight. It also went from being a state where the administration was reliant on foreign donors and military support to one where the government depends for funding on the domestic economy and its taxpaying citizens. AAN’s new special report is a first attempt at making sense of one of the most fundamental of these changes – the Emirate’s need to tax its citizens. Kate Clark, with research support from the AAN team, explores the ramifications of the Taleban’s serious-minded pursuit of taxation, the consequences to citizens across the country, to state power and the dilemmas it has created for donors.

Read “Taxing the Afghan Nation: What the Taleban’s pursuit of domestic revenues means for citizens, the economy and the state” here.

At the core of the new report are interviews with more than 100 Afghans from across the country who were asked first about their experiences of the Taleban takeover, and subsequently how the economic collapse was affecting their household economy. Taxation emerged as a significant theme. These interviews gave a good view of what was happening on the ground. They also ensured that Taleban fiscal policy was viewed first of all through a human lens.

From the interviews, a picture emerges of a new administration moving swiftly and seriously to collect revenue of all types and with far less corruption than the old regime. Not everyone we heard from felt their tax bill had been fair or drawn up according to the rules. Some described Taleban tax collectors as menacing and implacable, demanding money they could not afford. Others said negotiation was possible. Just one interviewee reported that tax collectors in his district were demanding bribes. The Taleban have also rolled out new taxes, in particular, on agricultural production. This represents a massive transfer of resources from the rural economy to the state. In some districts, they have demanded taxes that fall outside the rules, whether Ministry of Finance regulations or Islamic practice, and look to be extortionate.

The Taleban’s diligence in taxing the nation is driven by the very different position they are in compared to the Republic. It had no need to prioritise tax collection. For 20 years, much – possibly most – of the money paid out by taxpayers and traders importing goods was diverted into the pockets of corrupt officials and politicians and, to a lesser extent, the insurgency. Even so, there was always enough foreign money coming into the country that citizens scarcely felt the deficit. Public services continued. Meanwhile, the Taleban used the taxes they collected to run the insurgency while foreign money and, increasingly in the latter days of the Republic, taxpayers in government-controlled areas kept funding public services.

The Republic was dependent on foreign funding. That, in turn, made the Hamed Karzai and Ashraf Ghani administrations financially autonomous from the people. Indeed, often, they appeared more answerable to donors than their own citizens. In contrast, the Emirate needs to tax and, as our report shows, they are managing to raise large amounts of domestic revenue despite the massive contraction of the economy. In this, the Taleban could be said to be ‘doing well’. However, that is a slippery concept when it comes to taxation. If taxes pay for what a population wants – education, healthcare, better roads, a competent administration – they are usually seen as a public good. If people consider their rulers are taking their money without seeing the benefits, ‘unfair’ taxation can plant enmity towards the state.

One of the problems facing Afghan citizens today is that they do not know how the government is spending their money. The Taleban have released the barest details of their budget. Moreover, some types of taxation appear not to be included in official revenue figures.

Both citizens and donors need greater financial transparency from the Emirate. For donors, this is especially the case this year as they gear up to again provide funding for basic services, albeit in parallel systems that seek to avoid money going directly to the Taleban administration. Increased donor funding will inevitably free up money that the Emirate was spending on healthcare, support to farmers or other services, enabling it to be spent elsewhere – on security, intelligence or other sectors donors are least inclined to bolster.

Transparency is also important for the Taleban’s reputation. Until now, they have appeared far less corrupt than the Republic, largely because of their relatively clean revenue collection. However, collecting revenues is just one part of the cycle of public finance where corruption can manifest. Without openness on expenditure that better reputation cannot go unquestioned.

This new special report also asks what the Taleban’s tough approach to taxation means for households, given how poor, vulnerable and hungry so many Afghans are. In AAN’s previous work on household economies, we have seen again and again how even the poorest seek to help those in even worse need than themselves. Charity is embedded in the Afghan psyche and social fabric, but how well can people carry on helping others if the state is taking their marginal income?

Read the full report here.

Want more accountability for the Taliban? Give more money for human rights monitoring.

September 29, 2022 Analytical articles

Protecting human rights in Afghanistan should be both a policy priority and a national security priority for the United States.

Ahead of the U.N. General Assembly last week, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Afghanistan Richard Bennett released his first report grading the Taliban’s treatment of Afghans’ rights. It was an F. In the past year, the Taliban have engaged in a full-scale assault on Afghan’s human rights, denying women access to public life, dismantling human rights institutions, corrupting independent judicial processes, and engaging in extralegal measures to maintain control or to exact revenge for opposition to their rule. That is one of the main reasons — along with their continued support of al-Qaida and a refusal to form a more inclusive government — that Afghanistan has no representation at the U.N.

A Resource Gap

The grave human rights violations documented by the U.N. and brave Afghan human rights monitors are not being met with appropriate resources for investigations that could put pressure on the Taliban to reduce human rights violations or ultimately hold them accountable. Bennett’s team is strong but small, relying on limited trips to Afghanistan to investigate allegations of atrocities and lacking resources for translation of their work into Afghan languages. The special rapporteur can identify whether the Taliban are upholding their legal human rights obligations but not fully assess the scale and scope of violations or conduct detailed fact finding on specific cases.

The special rapporteur’s report also highlights a gap in U.S. resources. While the United States has taken some promising steps, including appointing Special Envoy for Afghanistan Women, Girls, and Human Rights, Rina Amiri, the diplomatic attention has not been matched by funding that could be used to shore up U.N. monitoring efforts and to maintain an Afghan civil society capable of documenting and reporting on the Taliban’s human rights practices. Amiri has no programming budget and the bureaus that normally fund local human rights monitors have seen their Afghanistan budgets slashed.

Protecting human rights in Afghanistan is both a policy priority and a national security priority for the United States. Taliban atrocities in the 1990s accelerated the involvement of neighboring countries that supported proxies in the Afghan civil war, which in turn created safe havens for al-Qaida to plan the 9/11 attacks. One of the few ways the current situation in Afghanistan could get worse is for there to be a civil war fueled by resentment over widespread human rights abuses.

The index of Bennett’s report reads like a textbook of all categories of human rights that are recognized and protected in U.N. treaties. Most notable, Bennett writes, “In no other country … are they [women and girls] as disadvantaged in every aspect of their lives.” The Taliban claim to be protecting women’s rights under their interpretation of Sharia, but that has meant “suspending girls’ secondary education, enforcing mandatory hijab wearing, stipulating that women must stay home unless necessary, banning women from undertaking certain types of travel without a close male family member (mahram) …” This list could go on and on.

Bennett also states that there are credible reports of retaliatory killings, torture, and arbitrary arrests in areas of ethno-political resistance to the Taliban. In two predominantly Tajik provinces north of Kabul, Bennet cited reports of “civilians being subjected to arbitrary arrest, extrajudicial killings and torture … some amounting to what appears to be collective punishment.”

Protecting Rights, Preventing Impunity

There is a natural tendency to read Bennett’s report and throw one’s hands up in despair. The Taliban haven’t changed; we have little leverage over them. Now what? The pursuit and protection of human rights in Afghanistan is a long game, however, and there is a human rights toolkit that should be applied in Afghanistan. It is also important to prevent impunity for atrocities from becoming entrenched, which increases the chances for more widespread and systematic violence.

First, Bennett has demonstrated that the scope and scale of the human rights violations warrants increased resources to conduct more detailed fact-finding on specific incidents, including forensic investigations as necessary to pursue accountability for violations, not just reporting on them. Bennet’s office also performs a vital public outreach function, including among Afghans that speak in local languages. More money for translation, strategic communications and dissemination of the reports would enhance the impact of his work.

Second, the profound implications of the Bennett report should trigger an increase in funding for U.S. government agencies that support human rights monitoring and advocacy in Afghanistan. Beyond Amiri’s policy mandate, the State Department and USAID should be funded to support Afghan human rights monitors on the ground or in the diaspora. Notably, the United States provided Afghanistan’s previous democratic government with millions in grants and technical support to Afghan human rights organizations. Yet now that violations are occurring at even greater orders of magnitude, the funding has dried up.

While it is manifestly more difficult for Afghan organizations to publicly discuss human rights under Taliban rule, there are brave civil society actors who are gathering evidence of abuses and pushing the Taliban to practice the Islamic ideals of justice they espouse. Combining quiet documentation work by Afghans in the country with secure evidence storage and more public advocacy by diaspora groups is one way to mitigate risk and apply more pressure on the Taliban — a model that has been used in Syria and by the Uyghur community.

Finally, the U.S. should support the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is considering a request by its prosecutor, Karim Khan, to renew its investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan. Following the Taliban takeover, Khan proposed to focus particularly on alleged crimes by the Taliban and ISIS in Afghanistan because “the gravity, scale and continuing nature of [their] alleged crimes … demand focus and proper resources.” Providing support to human rights defenders who can give evidence to the ICC will put further pressure on the Taliban and will not involve any investigation of U.S. forces — as some ICC critics fear.

The human rights situation in Afghanistan is getting worse and, unfortunately change is likely to be incremental. But the Taliban’s woeful scorecard over its first year is an urgent warning that more must be done to slow the rate of decline and hold the Taliban accountable. The good news is that this is a problem more resources can help to solve.

Concrete Assistance

Finding Partners

Iran’s Unprecedented Uprising

Afghanistan, Iran: Sisters’ Synergy

Afghans’ Continued Resistance

Building a Sisterhood

NATO’s last man in Kabul helped facilitate the airlift and had a front-row seat to the Taliban takeover of the capital.

But first they must present a united front to win the support they need to dislodge the Taliban.

A Resource Gap

Protecting Rights, Preventing Impunity

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